Motörhead’s singer on the best tour diets, American cheese and food fights.

(Source: Observer)

My mother made this upside-down cake that went horribly wrong. I made her make it again and again, for years, because I liked it so much. It never worked, yet it always worked, if you get my drift.

I don’t eat vegetables. I eat potatoes and green beans and that’s it. I don’t care if you eat 200 artichokes, you still won’t last through a tour. Mushy peas, I like. Brussels sprouts, foul. I won’t eat anything with onions in whatsoever, I hate them – me and Ringo Starr have that in common.

When I lived in Heaton Moor Lane in Stockport in the early 60s there’d be 35 other people living in the same room, so it was kind of cramped. The basic diet consisted of creamed rice. Punch two holes in the can with an old beer-bottle opener and you can suck the Ambrosia out, no problem.

I developed a taste for cold food. I couldn’t afford room service so I started stealing food uneaten left out on trays. Cold spaghetti, cold chips, cold steak. Cold pizza is a perfect breakfast, with lots of salt.

Girls used to steal food to feed us, out of their parents’ fridges and from stores. I knew one bird who could steal a box of cereal from a shop while only wearing a tiny mini-skirt and T-shirt. Where Phyllis hid the cornflakes I’ll never know.

I was in the Rockin’ Vicars, which was the first British band to tour behind the Iron Curtain. A lot of photos were taken of us next to milk churns. We had dinner – some terrible borscht – with President Tito [in Yugoslavia], but I was down under the table and don’t think he was particularly impressed.

Living in LA makes it so much easier to get food. I can have a full meal with two waiters and a table, brought to my door. Or order pre-cooked bacon strips, shipped to me in a polystyrene container of dry ice from Omaha Steaks. Yet I can’t buy boil-in-a-bag fish with parsley sauce, and there’s no proper Heinz baked beans, they’re in a different sauce. But mainly it’s the cheeses I object to.

My rider is a few biscuits, a few cakes, a meat plate, a cheese plate, some cigs, some JDs. I must say, I’m not completely fixated on Jack Daniel’s – it’s just that it’s the one with the best distribution system worldwide. At one point I mainly drank Southern Comfort mixed with Special Brew. What was I thinking?

If a bus driver says “You will not make a mess on this bus,” that’s tempting fate, isn’t it? I love food fights.

I once judged a spaghetti-eating contest, with Sam Fox. I just said ‘”Him first, him second and him third'”. They were gross, faces buried in huge bowls, covered in marinara sauce, I couldn’t tell one from the other.

I make a very good steak. I’ve never worn an apron – it’s beyond all reason. I prefer a completely splatter-free diver’s outfit in the kitchen.

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Black Dogs Defined

This is the best of me; for the rest, I ate, and drank, and slept, loved and hated, like another: my life was as the vapour and is not; but this I saw and knew; this, if anything of mine, is worth your memory.

(John Ruskin, Sesame and Lilies)

Whatever people say I am, that’s what I’m not.

(Alan Sillitoe, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning)

This is my letter to the world, that never wrote to me.

(Emily Dickinson, This is my letter to the world)

Safe upon the solid rock the ugly houses stand:
Come and see my shining palace built upon the sand!

R.A.D. Stainforth

I was born before The Beatles’ first LP and brought up in the reeking slums of Jericho. I am in love with a woman called Hazel and in love with her daughter, also called Hazel, both of whom I met at Alcoholics Anonymous.